Choosing Service over Sales

by admin | Nov 6, 2025 | WebRTC

While watching a video by Belinda Goodrich, where she mentions that how a trip to India changed her life and shares three quotes with the audience while ending her talk.

The quotes are

Honour over Hustle

People over Profits

Service over Sales

All three quotes made me thinking as how can I make sense of all these quotes and how can I implement even one in my current work life. The first quote is what I try to implement when dealing with people and I realise the immediate benefits I get out those discussions/ conversations where I try to follow this. The second quote may not be highly relevant for us as of now as the product we are building is yet to become profitable. Whenever it becomes profitable in near future, it will be for the effort of the whole team and the team will be the cause of that profit but not vice-versa. Therefore I think it is justified to put the team first and profit later. The third quote is what made me think deeply that how we can embed the service component in to our upcoming sales process. This is a good time to do such a thing as we are in the starting phase of building our sales team from scratch and we are yet to hire our first sales engineer!

As an individual and team, I have built a couple of video conferencing applications from scratch for various use cases including video banking, video teaching learning, tele-health, video commerce etc. When I built my first video conferencing system way back in 2014, it was purely for fun. I built to have a video call with my friends without using Skype or Hangout, the 2 most popular video conferencing services of that time. After that I built an interview recording system for a College Professor and his PhD candidate for some research purposes. Afterwards, I built a couple of video conferencing and live streaming systems as proof of concepts for advanced use cases of those times using things like Kurento, OpenCV, face detection/ recognition, in video object detection for use cases like in video e-commerce etc.

It was in the year 2016, when I thought of doing something serious about this video thing and started building an ed-tech startup in order to help people teach and earn money online. It had all the components in it like live streaming, recording, hand raising, social learning, content sharing among different groups and sections of students etc. We built all this in 6 -12 months of time. It was around early 2017, when we released our 1st version for public use and got some good as well as bad feedback. The response was not that great especially in Indian market due to 2 -3 primary reasons. The data cost per GB was way too high( INR 250,$3.5/GB on 3g speeds), 4G speed was not there which is good for video calls and unavailability of suitable consumer hardware devices with teachers to teach online. After trying out for couple of months, we went to colleges to check if they will be willing to buy our platform as a subscription to promote anytime anywhere teaching learning. We specifically told the colleges that this will enhance your existing teaching learning experience and prepare you for a future where online teaching will be a common thing(which is the case now!). The colleges told us that such a future is at least a decade away from that time i.e. from 2017. It was not that great of a success trying to sell our platform as a SaaS. Then we asked them if they can let us know what they wanted to buy to which they said that they wanted to buy an ERP. We decided to give it a try to check if we can integrate an ERP into it, which took us a good amount of time. Though it was not making sense to us at that point of time, we decided to go with customer demand. When we took our new thing to them , they said that they only want an ERP but not online teaching learning thing. If we wish to give them for free, then they may try to use it. All the video tech guys out there know it very well that except companies like Microsoft and Google with huge war chests, tiny tots like us won’t be able to provide free video conferencing / live streaming services to colleges with the resources the services demand to run efficiently. Finally, we had to shut things down at March 2019 as things were not going as expected and we were still some distance away from break-even.

When I look back today, I ask this question to myself that what I would have been done differently at that time so that the result would have been different today? I was not able to find any answer to this question until March 2020. But from April 2020, all things started to become more and more clear. Now I know a definitive answer(almost!) to this question and the answer is if I would have been chosen a Service over Sales route, there would have been a different outcome. There were guys at that time as well, who were having troubles teaching offline but they were fantastic guys in what they taught. They were ready to try us out and ready to cover our bare minimum costs. But we didn’t like them at that time because they didn’t meet the textbook definition of how a typical customer of a SaaS product should look like. We didn’t give much importance to them rather than chasing our typical customers and we came to the conclusion which we got at March 2019. If we would have chosen to give our wholehearted focus on satisfying those who were interested in taking our product as a Service to them, the result would have been different today!

May be that’s why there is a saying that experience comes from not so good decisions!

With that experience, as we are going to launch a product again soon, we are dedicated this time to do the Sales as a Service. To begin with, we have decided to offer our whole platform along with all the features including the cutting edge once to a chosen few purely as a Service without any kind of Profit for us for a time period of 12 -24 months. We are going to provide our complete platform to a selected few Not for Profit organisations. Why only to provide to not for profit organisations because we will also be working on a non-profit basis from our side.

Here is what we are going to provide.

• Our complete platform on an independent subdomain of your choice as a dedicated service
• Future upgrades and enhancements
• Customer support and trouble shooting support
• Bug fixing if any

Here is who you should be.

• You should be a not for profit organisation from any part of the world.
• You should be either from edu-tech, fin-tech, insure-tech, surveillance-tech or health-tech domain.
• You should have an existing product or service in the market for at least 2-3 years serving your end users.
• You should have a need in existing product or service where video can enhance the success of your product / service, either significantly or marginally.
• You should be willing to pay for your cloud bills. In case we get enough credits from our cloud partner, we can try to cover some part of this as well but we can’t assure you that it will happen. It may happen or mayn’t happen as well.
• Last but not the least, we need a small commitment fee(in 1$$$) only once. We need this in order to confirm that you are committed to integrate video our rooms in order to enhance your own value proposition and you are not in the experimental stage of your own offering where you are not sure that video can enhance your own value proposition or not.

If you are looking for building a video conferencing app either for video banking, video insurance, video surveillance,video education or video health, do let us know. We will be super happy to help you build your own app or enhance your existing one to make it better. There is also another great option to adopt our service as a managed service for your own use case and build on top of it.

Here is the link to our latest video rooms:- Magic rooms

We are reachable on email at hello@centedge.io. You also can chat with us using the chat widget on this website. We typically respond within 5 minutes or sooner for chat and 1 day (max.) for email . You can schedule a free 30 mins call with one of our senior consultants using this link for resolving your doubts/ concerns not only about our services but also about how your existing services using WebRTC for video conferencing or live streaming can be improved. Here is our LinkedIn page to stay connected.

Here is the Link to the video from which I got the inspiration.

Building a cutting-edge WebRTC Video conferencing app in one hour!

by admin | Nov 6, 2025 | WebRTC

Building a WebRTC powered videoconferencing app is really cool and one can use it for multiple purposes including showing off to friends! The real challenge lies in understanding the complexities involved in WebRTC and then successfully dealing with it to build an app. Though it is not necessary to understand all the complexities from the beginning to build the app and one can gradually learn the concepts as one progresses with usage of WebRTC. While working with WebRTC for a couple of years now, we thought of coming up with something to help others build cutting edge video conferencing apps from scratch within an hour. We finally were able to build a npm module a couple of days ago for that same purpose. This blog post is going to provide a practical walk through on how to use that npm module to build a cutting edge video conferencing app from scratch Or integrate it to an existing app within an hour.

The npm module is a pre-baked reactjs ui component consisting of 2 pages, one for pre-call audio / video check and another for the video conferencing room itself. As it is a react component, one can easily integrate it to any existing react project to enable the app with cutting edge video conferencing capabilities. We are going to create a simple react app from scratch using create-react-app for the sake of simplicity and ease of implementation. But feel free to use the same code as mentioned below to use it in a more complex, existing react project. In order to follow this post, one needs a basic understanding of JavaScript and Reactjs. Lets begin!

If you are somebody who likes to do a git clone first and then go through this post, then here is the github link for you to download the source code and run it in your local system.

Before beginning, do keep in mind that you DON’T need a Credit card OR an API key/secret combo OR even a Signup at Centedge to run this app. You simply need to follow this tutorial and build your app. No strings attached !!

Before starting to build our app, we need to have node and npm install in our computer to follow through this post. If you don’t have those installed yet, please visit this link to download and install nodejs and npm for your OS. If you are on a Linux flavour like Ubuntu, then visit this link.

Once you have node and npm installed on your system, you are ready to create the app. Use this to create a new react app.

mkdir react-demo
cd react-demo
npx create-react-app <name-of-your-app> //Ex. react-videoconf-demo

The above commands will create a folder called react-demo in the current directory and create a sample react app named react-videoconf-demo (if you have chosen the example app name as your app name) inside that folder. You can run the default app to view it in the browser by following the steps mentioned in the output of the above mentioned command or by following these mentioned below.

cd <name-of-your-app>
npm start 

After this you should see the below output in your browser, if everything is fine until now. If you are not getting this output or you are facing some issue starting the sample application, you may not have installed node and npm properly! Please reinstall them and start from scratch again by following the above mentioned steps. If you got this output, please proceed ahead.

The sample react app project structure should look like as mentioned below. You may not have the yarn.lock file if you are using npm. Instead you will have package-lock.json and this is okay.

Now we are ready to make changes to our sample app and start integrating the necessary components to build our cutting-edge video conferencing app.

The default app.js file looks like as shown below which we are going to change soon.

Now replace everything from this file with the code mentioned below.

import React from 'react';
import { BrowserRouter, Route, Switch } from "react-router-dom";
import AdminComponent from './components/AdminComponent';
import UserComponent from './components/UserComponent';
import LandingComponent from './components/LandingComponent';
import './App.css';

function App() {
 
 return (
 <BrowserRouter>
 <div className="App">
 
 <Switch>
 <Route path="/" component={LandingComponent} exact />
 <Route path="/admin" component={AdminComponent} exact />
 <Route path="/user" component={UserComponent} exact />
 </Switch>
 
 </div>
 </BrowserRouter>
  );
}

export default App;

This is what we are trying to achieve with the above code block.

• Using react-router to load 3 separate components named Landing, admin and user using 3 separate URLs
• All the components are defined in a folder named components inside src from which we are importing them to use in the App component.
• We are importing the default css file to load some styles.
• The next lines are the syntax to load those 3 different components in 3 separate unique URLs including 1 default landing URL.
• You also need to install the react router npm package named react-router-dom to run the app. You can install the same using the below one liner.

npm install react-router-dom

Below are the individual components imported in the app.js file.

LandingComponent.jsx

import React from 'react';
import { useHistory } from "react-router-dom";

 const LandingComponent = () =>{
 const history = useHistory();
 return(
 <div>
 <h1>Hello, My App!</h1>
 <button onClick={()=>{history.push('/admin')}}>Join as Admin</button>
 <button onClick={()=>{history.push('/user')}}>Join as User</button>
 
 </div>
 
     )
 }
export default LandingComponent;

AdminComponent.jsx

import React from 'react';

 const AdminComponent = () =>{
 
 return(
 <div>
 <h1> hello, Admin !</h1>
 </div>
 
     )
 }
export default AdminComponent;

UserComponent.jsx

import React from 'react';

 const UserComponent = () =>{ 
 return(
 <div>
 <h1> hello, user !</h1>
 
 </div>
 
     )
 }
export default UserComponent;

Now, the folder structure should look like as below.

If you have followed the tutorial correctly until now, you should get the below output in the landing page when you run the app.

The URL is http://localhost:3000/

This is what you will get when you click the ” Join as Admin” button.

The URL is now changed to http://localhost:3000/admin

This is what you will get when you click the ” Join as User” button.

The URL is now changed to http://localhost:3000/user

If you haven’t got the above mentioned output in your app, please recheck the previous steps. You may have missed something important! If you got the desired output, you are ready to proceed.

Now that the skeleton is ready for building our video conferencing app, we need to install the necessary packages to make it happen. The most important package to make it happen is named cvr-rui. You need to download this package using the below mentioned command.

npm install cvr-rui

One it is installed, replace the content of AdminComponent with the below code.

import React from 'react';
import ParticipantPage from 'cvr-rui';

 const AdminComponent = () =>{
 const callEnded = () =>{
 console.log('hey, the call has been ended!!');
 
    }
 const callStarted = () =>{
 console.log('hey, the call has been started!!');
 
    }
 const webVideoConfig = {
 theme:'light',
 joinButtonColor:'secondary',
 roomName:'my-1st-video-room',
 userName:'admin-user',
 participantType:'moderator',
 adminApprovalRequiredToJoinRoom:false,
 screenSharing:true,
 chatOption:true,
 callStartFunction:callStarted,
 callEndFunction:callEnded,
      }

 return(
 <div>
 <ParticipantPage config={webVideoConfig} />
 </div>
 
     )
 }
export default AdminComponent;

Also replace the UserComponent code with the below code.

import React from 'react';
import ParticipantPage from 'cvr-rui';

 const UserComponent = () =>{ 
 const callEnded = () =>{
 console.log('hey, the call has been ended!!');
    }
 const callStarted = () =>{
 console.log('hey, the call has been started!!');
    }
 const webVideoConfig = {
 theme:'dark',
 joinButtonColor:'primary',
 roomName:'my-1st-video-room',
 userName:'regular-user',
 participantType:'',
 screenSharing:true,
 chatOption:true,
 callStartFunction:callStarted,
 callEndFunction:callEnded,
      }

 
 return(
 <div>
 <ParticipantPage config={webVideoConfig} />
 </div>
 
     )
 }
export default UserComponent;

If you have followed the post properly until now,you will get a result as below when you try to load the AdminComponent by clicking on the Join as Admin button in your landing page

and the UserComponent by clicking on the the Join as User button in your landing page.

Now is the time to click the join room button in both the pages. Once you click the Join Room buttons, the magic happens as shown below.

When only admin user joined the room

when regular user also joined the room

Admin view after regular user joined the room

Now we have successfully created a cutting edge video conferencing app with active speaker detection and real time bandwidth monitoring and display enabled by default.

You can also easily integrate it into any existing react project to enable it with cutting edge video conferencing capabilities. Please feel free to drop us an email at hello@centedge.io in case of any issue while trying to follow this post or in case of a bug in the npm package.

The link to the npm package is here.

The link to the Centedge app running a very similar UI is here.

Note

This react ui is running with the help of a small scale video back-end infrastructure sponsored by Centedge along with some generosity from AWS. That’s why you don’t need a Credit card OR an API key / secret combo OR even a Signup at Centedge to run this app! As this is a small scale setup, we don’t advise anybody to build production grade video applications using this npm package which internally depends on infrastructure from Centedge. The back-end setup currently can handle 6 participants in one room including moderator and can handle 5 such rooms simultaneously! Please feel free to play around and tinker around using this package. If you want to build something serious using this and need more number of rooms or more number of participants in each room, feel free to drop us an email at hello@centedge.io and we will be happy to create a production grade infrastructure setup for you.

Becoming a WebRTC developer

by admin | Nov 6, 2025 | WebRTC

” How to become a WebRTC developer? “is the question many developers ask these days who want to learn this niche technology. The situation was not like this exactly 2 years ago and it was the technology of hobbyists and a very limited set of professionals working in video conferencing enterprises. Then COVID happened and the world started to run on video as strict social distancing measures along with lock downs were enforced through out the world. Everything started from shopping, learning, health checkups even marriages and funerals started to happen in an online video conferencing mode. WebRTC is the technology that made it possible to create video applications for all of these unique use cases. The demand for WebRTC developers skyrocketed since then, where as there are only a handful of skilled WebRTC developers are out there even today.Many enterprises / startups are going through a lot of pain these days to find good WebRTC developers.

As an early adopter and pioneer in the field of WebRTC, we also face a very similar situation, while trying to hire good WebRTC developers. In order to solve this problem, we will be starting to organise weekly / monthly events for students / experienced professionals where they will be briefed about the benefits of WebRTC as technology stack and how it can help them start / restart their career if they understand and master it.

If you are a student / experienced professional with < 5 years of experience/ then this online event is for you. The details are as below.

Topic: How to become a good WebRTC developer

Timing: Saturday evenings

Participants: 50 ( First come first serve basis)

Slack: Centedge

Please join the above slack link and then join the #webrtc-developers-den channel to get notified about the exact timing and meeting link to join the session. Here we also will post the learning materials, open source projects, developer/tester requirements from time to time.

PS: At Centedge we are working on a cutting edge virtual event platform which is currently in the testing environment. If you are interested in helping us test the platform thoroughly, then don’t forget to join the #testing-captains slack channel as well.

We are looking forward to host you in the coming Saturday to help you become a good WebRTC developer. Feel free to ask us any question / doubt in slack, once you join the #webrtc-developers-den